The Winter Family (37 page)
Authors: Clifford Jackman
And the sheriff said no. No, it didn’t seem strange to him at all.
The Winter Family came upon a Quechan youth hunting in the desert a few miles to the north of the border with Mexico. He stood still in the desert as they approached, wearing a clean poncho, leaning on an elderly musket, and shading his eyes with his hand. Charlie dismounted swiftly and knocked the boy’s weapon away. The young man was startled rather than angry, unable to conceive what was about to happen to him. They learned the location of his village and that there were twenty-seven people in it, along with a white man who had arrived the night before. Then Charlie stabbed the young man hard in the chest, three times, in a punching motion, while the Indian made a surprised and agonized gasping noise. Charlie jerked back on the Indian’s hair and scalped him while he still breathed.
“Let’s get them all,” he said.
A new recruit to the Family, a Mexican named Francisco, expressed some doubt.
“That’s a Quechan village. They’re not Apache.”
“You think those fuckers in Hermosillo can tell the difference?” Charlie said.
“We are close to the border,” Francisco said. “We should get across.”
“Come on, Auggie,” Charlie said. “This is easy money.”
Everyone looked at Winter, but something was different about him. It was not that he was unsure, but rather that he was uncaring.
“Auggie?” Charlie said.
Winter leaned back in the saddle and shrugged. He was slightly tanned from all the riding in the desert but otherwise his appearance was pristine.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
An uneasy feeling settled over them. They glanced at one another.
“Let’s go,” Francisco said.
“No,” Quentin said. “Charlie’s right. We’ll make the detour. It won’t take long. Use your knives. There is no need to waste powder or shot. Let’s ride now.”
Everyone looked to Winter, but he did not even nod. They were disturbed to see him following another man’s lead.
The Family rode up hard on the little village and then dismounted. Some men stayed with the horses while the others crept through the scrub toward a few huts clustered around a well, together with a general store and some fenced-off pasture. An old woman pounding on a hanging carpet caught a glimpse of Johnny in the bush. She did not take any time to wonder who he was. She screamed, and the Winter Family sprinted toward her.
At first everything was chaos, as men and women and children ran back and forth, shrieking, while the Family chased them. Then there was the first gunshot.
“Who was that idiot?” Charlie shouted.
A white man had come out of one of the huts. He was tall and thin with red hair, wearing only a pair of trousers with his suspenders hanging down around his knees. A rifle dangled loosely, almost carelessly, in his fingers. But Francisco was lying dead on the ground, with the back of his head a gory mess.
“Who the fuck—” Charlie started, as he reached for his gun. And then he was shot, knocked onto his back and staring up into the sky with a peculiar heaviness in his chest. The bullet had cracked a rib.
The shirtless man’s rifle moved from side to side with languid grace. He fired four more shots in four seconds, but there did not seem to be any hurry about it.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang
. Four men dropped, unerringly picked off amid all the fleeing Indians, before a single member of the Winter Family could draw a gun. Then the shirtless man grabbed a revolver from a corpse and fell back around a corner.
Charlie sat up, struggling to breathe. Johnny wrapped a thick arm around him and helped him to his feet. Dusty charged past them, his pistol at the ready, heading for the hut that was sheltering the shooter.
And then the shirtless man stepped back out into the road, his left palm hovering over the hammer of the revolver, and he recommenced to shoot.
“Oh!” Dusty cried, knocked back, holding his gut.
“Go, go, go!” Charlie wheezed at Johnny, and the two Empire brothers fled.
The shirtless man emptied his revolver with a kind of preternatural grace the veterans of the Winter Family had seen before. But
whereas Lukas Shakespeare had always been exploding with passion, frantic and urgent with his need to kill, Matt was surgical and cold.
The Quechan, heartened by the sight of all the white corpses, were now fighting back. They used what guns they had and even those without guns, even the women and children, were charging forward with knives, axes, hoes, rakes, fists, and teeth. The Family fell back, an undignified retreat, firing their weapons and falling over themselves as they ran.
“Who the shit is that?” Augustus Winter said to Bill Bread. They had hung toward the back and were able to take shelter behind a bush when the shooting began. “He shoots like Lukas Shakespeare.”
“It could be Lukas,” Bill said. “Wasn’t he in Arizona with his brothers?”
“He’s too tall to be Lukas,” Winter said.
Winter had his rifle out and was peeking through the branches. Matt Shakespeare had picked up a pistol and jammed it in the back of his pants and he had another rifle in his hands. Winter might have been able to shoot him then. But if he missed he would give away his position.
“Let’s go,” Winter said.
“Not a very profitable sojourn, was it?” Bill said as they jogged away.
“I don’t know about that,” Winter said. “We don’t got to divide up the money into so many shares now.”
“What do you think of what the captain said?” Bill asked.
“How do you mean?” Winter said.
“Do you think he’s right, Winter?”
“About what?”
Bill thought at first that Winter was being uncharacteristically evasive. But that wasn’t it. Winter wanted Bill to say it out loud.
“That when it comes down to it,” Bill said, “everyone is just like you.”
Winter’s golden gaze met Bill’s. And then he looked away.
Back in the Quechan village, Matt Shakespeare stood over Dusty Kingsley.
“Oh my god,” Dusty said. “I’m going to die.”
“Who the hell are you?” Matt said.
“Dusty Kingsley,” Dusty said. “Oh my god.”
“You’re in the Winter Family,” Matt said. “That was the goddamn Winter Family. I thought I recognized Charlie.”
Dusty lifted his head from the dirt, looked at the blood welling through his fingers, and then leaned his head back and closed his eyes tightly and let out a groan.
“Can I have a drink of water?” Dusty said.
“You can have a bullet between the eyes,” Matt said. “Why were you killing Indians?”
“There’s a bounty on Apache scalps in Sonora.”
“But these aren’t Apache,” Matt said.
Dusty groaned. Eventually, Matt understood.
“Oh you piece of shit,” Matt said, disgusted, and fired his rifle into Dusty’s brain. Around him the Indians were coming out of their shock, trembling with fear and weeping for their dead. Two of the men approached Matt, stunned and grateful and slightly awed. When the federal marshals and the Pinkertons, on the trail of the Winter Family, arrived in the village, Matt Shakespeare would be gone. But the Quechan would tell them all about him.
The Winter Family arrived at Hermosillo in the noontime heat, when the air itself seemed to ripple and melt. They made their way through the deserted streets to the Plaza Zaragoza, where they carried their bloody harvest into the State Government Palace, for which they were paid in Mexican gold: the heads of several of Geronimo’s lieutenants, packed in salt and still recognizable, as well as scalps of around a hundred souls, including the scalp of a harmless Quechan youth, and of Homer De Plessey, originally of New Orleans, lately of Phoenix.
Every society has at its core an animating myth, a guiding narrative, a shared lens through which to view the world, but Augustus Winter had thought that he was different. That he alone among all men had the courage to face the truth of the world, to live according to the laws of nature, to follow the dictates of pure reason. That he alone gazed upon the face of God. And so it was a double disillusionment for him to discover that this belief itself had been his personal delusion
.
When the Winter Family crossed back into the United States, after years of carousing in Mexico, spending their money and wearing out their welcome, they found it much changed. The words of Captain Jackson rang in Winter’s ears when Sitting Bull surrendered and the forests melted away and the railroads wormed across the continent, connecting the clusters of men scattered through the wilderness. The new civilization grew like a crystal, as if guided by an invisible hand. Each acre of land was granted to a human owner, who shaped and developed it according to the formless but unrelenting pressure of economics and politics
.
After another train robbery, the Pinkerton Detective Agency was engaged to track them down and they acquired a new enemy. It was not like in the old days. There were fewer places to hide and their pursuers were stronger, angrier, more determined. The Winter Family divided, some traveling south to Mexico, others north to Colorado, and still others east to Kansas and Missouri. It did nothing to ease the pressure. Everywhere they went had changed, and everywhere they went they were pursued by the most feared Pinkerton of them all, young and gangly as a colt: Matthew Shakespeare
.
The West closed down around them, as fences went up and herds of cattle swarmed over the plains and the Indians vanished. News spread like lightning across the telegraph wires. The Winter Family regrouped; it was all they could do in the face of constant, relentless pressure from their enemy. All around them, pressing from all sides, the people, the
people, the people. Soon the only free space left was the Indian Territory, and even that was slowly being subsumed into Oklahoma. The Winter Family was hiding there when it was finally approached by Colin O’Shea
.
O’Shea was ten years old when he’d come to America to escape the potato famine. He fought in the War Between the States and used his money to buy land in Georgia that had been devastated by the March to the Sea. Then he spent fifteen years fighting Confederate veterans and the Ku Klux Klan to keep it. In the end, he prevailed
.
He had a prosperous farm but it wasn’t enough, and his ambitions were blocked in the Redeemed South, where former Confederates had bullied and intimidated their way back into power. In Oklahoma, the land was just opening up and they were practically giving it away. He sold his farm in Georgia for a substantial profit and went to Oklahoma at the head of a small company of men of all races. Instead of waiting for the land runs with the rest of the suckers he crossed into the territory and seized the best land for his own town, to be built according to his personal vision. Bitter men, men who were too slow or too timid, tried to challenge him through the Department of the Interior or otherwise. In the end they were all silenced
.
O’Shea invested in the foundation of a town, and the arrival of new settlers drove up the price of land. He lent money to new arrivals or leased them land with an option to buy. He owned the bank and the general store and the post office. He was even in negotiations with the railroad companies
.
There was more land, though. There always is. To the east, just across the border into Indian Territory, officially forbidden and out of reach, there was acreage that O’Shea needed to ensure that the railway ran through his town and not some other. However, the Indians who lived on it would not cooperate. O’Shea was not a man to be balked. He discreetly contacted his old friends, Union veterans, to find someone to help him get what he wanted. In 1889, he retained the Winter Family
.
The Family’s betrayal of him would have destroyed the town, had not Bill Bread, in turn, betrayed the Winter Family. The survivors scattered and fled, to seek refuge in a world that was now without refuge, for it had become too much like them. Winter himself melted into the wilderness, but the wilderness could not hide him much longer
.
The sky seemed bigger over the plains. The snow buried jagged edges and hid distinctive features of the landscape, making everything uniform and clean. A bird circling high in the sky, a deer glancing over its shoulder and bounding away. On the earth there were the people. Everything else was gone.
Winter’s life was simple, but precarious. If they did not find food they would die. There were no other complications, no politics or social hierarchies. Everyone had to be useful. Everyone put everything he had into the common; everyone took from it whatever he needed. The individual vanished but the people would live forever.
Winter was useful to the people. He could hunt, he could run for hours without tiring, he could make things with his hands, skin a deer, start a fire. He was, of course, a fearsome warrior. And in return he took all the good things in life: women, horses, food, and whiskey. Their language was the language of dreams, and when he sang their songs, it was as if he had sung them all his life.
There was no Winter any longer. He didn’t exist. That monstrous ego, that endless hunger, the needs and jealousies and hates and loves, they were all gone. In their place there was not happiness but a healthy emptiness, something calm and pure that filled him as the sky filled up the vacant space on the horizon. Happiness, or what had passed for it, had been a part of the other Winter’s life, in the moments of triumph, the pinnacles of ecstasy, and the sweet, numbed aftermath. That life was gone, and no new life had taken its place.